It’s very odd that John Humphrys, who loves to slash into prevaricating politicians on the Today programme, should have declared war on Melvyn Bragg with such a peculiar casus belli: the historic present. Influential as Mr Humphrys might be, it seems ambitious to abolish a tense.

“This is important, this is a battle,” he declared, undeterred, on Radio 4 this week. The historic present “gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy; it is irritating, it is pretentious.” The sort of thing he means is indeed very common on In Our Time, which Lord Bragg conducts on Thursday mornings, in season, with the help of academic experts.

The other day they were talking about good old Saint Hildegarde of Bingen. Where, asked Lord Bragg, did she get her learning? “The Benedictine monasteries play the most important role,” replied Almut Suerbaum of Somerville College, Oxford. “They are very important politically but they are also just places of intellectual learning.”

Monasteries are important now, of course, but Dr Suerbaum was talking about the 12th century. That is some time in the past, yet in her narrative the monasteries “play” and “are” in the present.

John Humphrys, 70, thinks this matters. He has a professional interest in observing the vagaries of English and has also made it a personal pastime. Lost for Words (2005) and Beyond Words (2007) are two of his books. He rightly questions whether the word issue should be used to mean “problem”, or plural pronouns (they) to avoid a specific gender (he). Melvyn Bragg, 74, apart from having written any number of novels, has also covered the history of the language in his book, The Adventure of English.

In their present hammer-and-tongs, then, it is remarkable that the pundit on each side seems to think that use of the historic present is something new. That’s John Humphrys’s gripe. He sees it as a parallel with two words that he doesn’t like to be used in what he also thinks of as a new sense: enormity and disinterested. With those, his argument is that, when people speak of enormity and mean “great size”, it undercuts the established sense of “a gross and monstrous offence”. Similarly, to use disinterested to mean “uninterested” makes it hard for anyone to use the word in the established sense of “impartial”.

But even in this argument he ignores the centuries, since at least 1792, during which enormity has been used to mean “enormousness”, and the even longer time, since 1631, that disinterested has been used to mean “uninterested”.

Melvyn Bragg, in a brief sally after Mr Humphrys’s assault, said: “I don’t think that’s my job, to tell somebody at the top of their game in scholarship to stop using that tense.” He acknowledged that the tense had been in use since Chaucer, but seemed at the same time to think it a new fashion, remarking: “It jars with me because all change in language jars until I get used to it.”

But what’s this? A novel that Melvyn Bragg published last year, called Mary and Grace, begins thus: “Mary’s voice, thinner now, is still certain and pure, the melody steadily held as she sits up in the bed and sways to the tune.” What’s that, the historic present or a shed full of bloaters?

A brief parenthesis: we call it the historic present. Americans tend to call it the historical present. Both are right. Historic does not always mean “having great historical importance”. When the Crown Prosecution Service refers to “historic sexual abuse”, it does not mean crimes that will go down in history. Actually, I’d have expected John Humphrys to fight for the distinction between historical and historic, but he seems not to mind.

One person who has succeeded spectacularly in the methodic use of the historic present is the novelist Hilary Mantel, in her Tudor trilogy beginning with Wolf Hall. It was one reason that the critic Amanda Craig did not like the books. She complained in The New Statesman of “the combination of the historic present and the lack of clarity, the word 'he’.” (The objection to “he” was a separate bugbear: the anonymous pronoun attached to the book’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell.)

Hilary Mantel dutifully defended the historic present. As she explained it: “The events were happening now, in the present tense, unfolding as I watched, and what followed would be filtered through the main character’s sensibility.” It’s strange that she didn’t say “unfolding as I watch”, but no matter.

Tense is the sort of thing that writers decide about as they start hacking away at a book. I decided when writing a travel book, The Train in Spain, which came out last year, to use the past tense, not the historic present. It went with my decision not to use “I” in the book. I wanted to write about things as they appeared, not about myself.

Even so, when it comes to things that simply are (oxygen is colourless; the Spanish are polite), then the present tense wins: “Jaca sits above the wide valley of the Aragón.” It still does. This is what Kingsley Amis, in his book on usage, The King’s English, calls the “durative” aspect, which with the inceptive aspect (“about to sit”) and frequentative aspect (“generally sit”) enrich English verbs. But there’s no discussion of that on Today.

There is, it is true, a tendency for imaginative writers to reach floppily for the historic present. It’s like poetry at school. Even young winners of the excellent John Betjeman poetry competition are drawn to the present tense: “Behind the hill, the sun slips, slow”; “I text my friends but find there’s no signal”; “I stand astride an upright knife”.

But at least we cannot blame the Americans for the popularity of the historic present. In fact, no one can be more prissy and prescriptive than old‑school American grammarians. They make John Humphrys look as relaxed as Huck Finn. More than 50 years ago, Wilson Follett in Modern American Usage conceded that “the historical present may break in for vividness, but see‑sawing disturbs the easy flow.”

I’d like to ask John Humphrys, too, whether he remembers watching Hamlet. When Horatio tells its hero about his father’s ghost appearing to his comrades, he does so thus: “A figure like your father, / Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie, / Appears before them, and with solemn march / Goes slow and stately by them.”

Passages like this are not unusual. From the 14th century on, that’s how English narratives have often been told. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from that period, is a good tale. This is how the Green Knight makes his entry: Ther hales in at the halle dor an aghlich mayster – “There hurtles in at the door of the hall a fearsome fellow, the tallest of all men upon Earth.” Indeed, that’s how we tell stories still: “Man walks into a bar. Ouch. It’s an iron bar.”

So, my advice is to chuck it, Humphrys. Use your terrier tenacity and unrivalled influence for better battles in the cause of English: beg the question, across, push back, Can I get?, even on (“on Oxford Street”) – all await your battle-axe.